Much of the interest in Guide has long come from outside the United
States and English-speaking nations. Naturally, having support for
languages other than English seemed like a good idea, and Guide 6.0
and later versions have made this especially easy to do.

But there is still some interest in other languages, such as
Portuguese, Hebrew, and some Northern European languages. So Guide
is presently arranged to make it easy to add up to eight more languages.
At present, these are specified to be Arabic, Hungarian,
Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Portuguese, and Gaelic.
But these assignments can be easily changed if some other language is
desired.

If you're interested in attempting such a translation, please let me
know. I may be able to put you in contact with others who may have
already translated parts of the files; I will also be extremely happy
to post your results for the use of others using that language. As with
any other part of Guide, please let me know what problems you find. Adding
other languages should be quite easy now; with each new language, some
bugs are found and fixed, and the process becomes more solid. But you may
find something I did not anticipate.

The key file in a translation is STRINGS.DAT; it contains the English
text for all menus, dialog boxes, and so forth used in Guide (DOS and
Windows). The German-language version of this file is DEUTSCH.DAT.
Then a switch was made to changing the extension, leading to
STRINGS.FRA (French), STRINGS.ITA (Italian), and so on. Finally, a
switch was made to just using a single letter.

For future languages, one need only name the translated file
STRINGS.DAx, where 'x' is a letter depending on the language, as
follows:

Thus, for example, the Finnish-language text would be placed in
STRINGS.DAP. Once that file became available, Guide would automatically
add a "Finnish" option to the Languages menu.

The five (*) items are partial exceptions, made before the consistent
single-letter system was adopted. For example, Italian text logically
ought to be in STRINGS.DAI. Instead, it's in STRINGS.ITA. Their 'single
letters' are still used elsewhere, though, as will be seen below. Other
languages that have at least had the STRINGS file translated are also
marked.

As you might expect, it is by no means necessary to translate the
entire file; most translators start with the text in the major menus,
or sometimes phrases they find particularly annoying in English. If
you examine, for example, STRINGS.DAC (the Russian-language version),
you will see that not all text has been translated yet. From time to time,
people send in updated language files, and
the update files are posted on the site.

STRINGS.DAT contains almost all the text Guide shows. Translate
it, and most users of your language will be very happy indeed. If you
wish, though, you can translate all but a few phrases, as described
below.

Some other small files that can be changed

All the files required are in plain ASCII text. You can use any
desired text editor to view and (when needed) change them. You can
change them one at a time; if Guide can't find, for example, the
Russian-language version of a file, it will fall back on the English
version.

You don't have to change these right away. But after STRINGS.DAT is
translated, you'll notice that there is still some text in English. The
following files explain where this text is and how to change it. If you
don't change them, Guide will just continue to use the English-language
data. The most important files are listed first.

You'll notice that usually, the translated files will have a nearly
identical file name, but with one letter changed, using the table given
above. For example, the Finnish-language version of ECANNED.DAT would
be PCANNED.DAT.

ECANNED.DAT, ECANNED2.DAT

These files contain English-language text used for providing
information from datasets on the CD-ROM.

(7 Jan 1999) "Normally", when you click on the Toolbar option in the
Settings menu, Guide provides a list of possible toolbar entries, in
English. It is now possible to translate that list, which appears in
TOOLBAR.DAT.

The Italian-language version is in ITOOLBAR.DAT, the French version
in FTOOLBAR.DAT, and so forth. As usual, if the file doesn't exist,
Guide just sticks to the use of English from TOOLBAR.DAT.

Note that the only use made of these additional files is for
providing the text in other languages. TOOLBAR.DAT contains a column of
'#' and space characters to indicate which buttons are in use; a column
of action code numbers", used to determine what action is taken when a
button is clicked; and the name of the bitmap used for a given button.
This data always comes from TOOLBAR.DAT. (If it did not, then
you could switch to Italian, toggle some toolbar buttons, then switch
back to English, and lose those changes.)

Also, the translated text will eventually be used to provide 'fly-by
hints'. If you leave the cursor over a toolbar button for a second or so,
a small yellow box will appear to tell you the meaning of the button.
I consider this to be pretty important, since it is nearly impossible to
guess the meaning of so many of the buttons!

CALENDAR.DAT

(12 Jan 1999) This file contains the text used for calendar month names,
days of the week, and similar calendar-related text, in assorted languages.
It was added because of a new feature: Guide's "Quick Info" now shows the
current date in various calendrical systems, such as the
Hebrew and
Islamic calendars. In this case,
one file contains the text for every language (a bit like SWAPNAME.DAT).
You do have the option of translating bits and pieces; for example, the
names of the week are currently in French, English, German, and
Italian, but the names of the months of the Hebrew calendar are in
English only. (And since they are really "transliterations" of the Hebrew
text, it is unlikely that there will be much effort to "translate" them
into other languages.)

"Note" (.NOT) files

Guide uses a series of .NOT files to provide "notes" on selected objects,
and to allow users to add their own notes for an object. For example,
NGC.NOT provides extra data on NGC objects. (At the moment, all it lists
is some data on what supernovae were found in NGC galaxies. But it can be
extended by anyone with a text editor.)

A German-language version of NGC.NOT would be named DNGC.NOT; a French-
language version, FNGC.NOT; Italian, INGC.NOT; Spanish, SNGC.NOT.
Similar letters would be added to the start for any other .NOT file
one would want to translate. For example, the Finnish-language version
of PLANETS.NOT would be PPLANETS.NOT.

Text-definition (.TDF) files

The .TDF files can be used to show almost any ASCII
data set in Guide, and to click on objects in those data sets to get
information about them. There are a few examples provided on the Guide
CD-ROM, as well as on this site.

The German-language version of a .TDF file would have the same name, and
the extension .DDF. The French-language version would have the extension
.FDF; Italian, .IDF; Spanish, .SDF; and so on.

EFINDORB.DAT (text for FIND_ORB)

The FIND_ORB orbit determination software shows
text from the file EFINDORB.DAT. The French-language version would be
FFINDORB.DAT; Italian, IFINDORB.DAT; Spanish, SFINDORB.DAT; and so
forth. FIND_ORB is really a tiny "demonstration" program,
distributed as copyrighted freeware; only a small amount of text
needs to be translated.

Some LARGE files that can be changed

The ultimate in translation requires converting the Help system (which
includes the glossary) and the users manual. All the files described
so far total about 40 KBytes of data. But the English-language help file,
HELP.TXT, is about 450 KBytes. The entire users manual is about 140 KBytes.
Obviously, translating these would not be an easy job!

The German-language version of HELP.TXT is DHELP.TXT, and the
Italian-language version is IHELP.TXT. (These are already
on the Guide CD-ROM.) For other languages, the same pattern applies;
for example, the Finnish version would be PHELP.TXT, and so on. If
such a file is in the Guide directory, then Guide will show help and
glossary information from them when you have toggled to those languages.

Notes for translators: From time to time, information that is
mostly of interest only to current translators will be posted here. Here
are some comments concerning the latest (12 Sep 1999) version:

It is unusual for me to change existing text in
STRINGS.DAT. But I did so, because of the new way that overlays
work. In the English-language version, lines 817 and 818 changed from

The first two are also used for the new overlay editing. When you edit
an overlay, the dialog box you get allows you to select "Add Circles",
"Add Lines", and "Add Text", but there is also a "Normal Mode" button
that lets you use the mouse "normally" (to click on objects, zoom and pan,
and measure distances.)

The next two are used in the CCD Frame dialog. This now shows the
focal length of "inches" or "mm", depending on what system of units you
chose in the Format dialog under Settings.

Masaki Kouda pointed out that the text on line 30, "Maximum magnitude:",
is used both as a prompt for "Make a List of Stars" and appears
when you right-click for information on a solar eclipse chart. In Japanese,
it is best to distinguish between a maximum star magnitude and a
maximum eclipse magnitude. So line 30 is used for the first case,
and line 1390 for the second case.

For all the STRINGS files, I have copied line 30 to line 1290. So if
your language does not make this distinction, you will be all set.

A lot of text has been added to EHELPEXT.DAT. Each change
(or addition) is marked with the line:

; 5 Sep 1999:

followed with a brief comment as to why the change was made.

Here are comments for the 4 September 1999 version:

The 'help extension file' EHELPEXT.DAT has grown a lot
with this new version.

As you'll see, a few lines of text have been added to the end of
STRINGS.DAT for the new features (mostly names of the new outer
planet satellites).

So far, Charon has been translated into
French only. (The English text is in CSTRINGS.DAT; the French
version is CSTRINGF.DAT.) Some new text has been added to
CSTRINGS.DAT to support the changes to Charon's Settings menu.

There is a new, "extra" note file for planets, PLANETS.NO1.
As you might expect, the Italian version is IPLANETS.NO1,
and so on. Right now, it has some data about the new
outer satellites. Each entry
is basically a "repeat" with different numbers. If you wish, just send me
a version with the first case (Himalia) translated, and the table near the
bottom translated. I can then translate the rest automatically (except for
some of the odd comments about Sycorax and Phoebe and such, of course.)

The changes in TOOLBAR.DAT are not as worrisome as you may think. If you add corresponding
lines to (for example) ITOOLBAR.DAT, Guide will add them in
when you run in that language. You do not have to worry about the order
of lines, or translate all of them. If Guide cannot find an entry in your
language, it will stick to the English version.